The present invention relates to chemical design systems, and more particularly, to a computer-based method and system for designing, locating, and procuring polymers and chemicals.
Advancements in computer technology have led to an increase in electronic commerce (e-commerce) transactions for businesses and industries around the world. Business-to-business (B2B) tools for implementing these technologies are becoming increasingly important in today's competitive marketplace, due in part to economic influences and the evolving global economy.
For chemical vendors and manufacturers, this presents a special challenge. Specialty or custom chemical compounds are often difficult to describe or communicate in electronic form due to their extensive and sometimes convoluted nomenclature and diverse structural forms.
One solution developed to address this issue relates to an interactive web site for constructing and submitting molecules of interest. The solution allows a user to construct small organic molecules of interest with molecular modeling programs such as ChemDraw®, which utilizes a ChemDraw plug in, or the JME Molecular Editor©, which utilizes a Java Applet. This solution is cumbersome, as each individual bond, atom, and reactive group must be drawn by the user for each structure desired. The software also requires the user to have some knowledge of how to operate chemical drawing software. No known solutions exist, however, that allow for the construction of polymers of interest to the perspective customer. The need exists for a tool that can assist a user in selecting and functionalizing monomeric and polymeric materials and that is a convenient and easy to use method of placing related chemical inquiries.